A look into award winning CIOs and projects

BANGALORE, INDIA: IT is a great enabler in doing business. Innovations and inventions in technology always reduce human efforts and increase process speed. Many such innovations go unnoticed and, as a result, fails to get a massive reach and acceptance.

Reaching its seventh year, CIOL-Dataquest Enterprise Awards have been addressing this, besides having many other objectives, by recognizing and rewarding excellence among CIOs of enterprise companies.

Today, CIOL and Dataquest jointly announced the Enterprise Awards 2010 winners in different categories at a grand function organized at The ITC Grand Maratha in Mumbai. The awards have a broad turnover classification of above Rs 1000 crore and below Rs 1000 crore. Also there are four individual awards.

Here is a look at the CIOs and the projects that won these prestigious awards.

Above Rs 1000 crore

Champion CIO: Rajiv Jain, Tata Sky

Tata Sky was faced with the challenge of reducing the outbound calls to the subscribers reminding him to make the payments well before the due date. To address this, the company launched Experience Zone concept — a decentralized approach of customer service.

As the customer sales and service are made possible at an affordable cost with this implementation, Tata Sky is able to reduce the de-active days by 13 per cent and calls to call center by 40 per cent and win back 32 per cent of subscribers and create 75 per cent of accounts through a simple application (EZ). The jury felt that the company has leveraged technology extremely to ensure customer satisfaction.

Gold CIO: P. Shobhana Ravi, Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited

Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited (TAFE) embarked on two projects — NewGen Connect @ TAFE and Knowledge Management Portalto to tackle the issues like productivity improvement, reduction of communication cost, ensuring real-time information, etc. NewGen Connect aimed to establish SMS/Mobile applications and integrate them with SAP for better decision making, while the Knowledge Management Portal was a platform to facilitate employees to share knowledge.

These implementations helped the company increase internal customer satisfaction. The jury felt that the company has achieved process excellence by improving productivity and customer comfort.

Silver CIO: Anil Jaggia, HDFC Bank Limited

When the economic recession along with the domestic business pressures to quickly open a large number of new HDFC bank branches and deploy IT infrastructure in them posed a big challenge to the bank, it undertook a project named 'Consolidation of Rural Branch Resources centrally' using Virtualization technologies (VMWare Vsphere 4.0 foundation Edition) for server, networking and storage space.

With this, the company saved 209 physical servers, 418 switch ports (approx 14 nos of 32 port LAN Switches), 140 U of usable rack space, 40 KW of power, 25 KW of power and more than 200 Windows license. The jury felt that the company's project has a pioneering focus on e-governance and has leveraged technology in an excellent manner.

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Below Rs 1000 crore

Champion CIO: Nilesh Sangoi, Meru Cab Company Pvt. Ltd

Meru Cabs' various in-house systems built to solve specific business problems were working in silos. Multiple data entries by different departments had caused mismatches in the master data between different systems. There were issues with regard to governance, controls and audits. The company implemented Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel CRM to tackle these issues.

As a result, utilization of its cabs increased by 1 per cent, resulting in an increase in its revenues by Rs 12 million. The company expects a saving of Rs 6 million in human capital cost also. The jury felt that the company, functioning in an unorganized sector, has implemented an innovative project to greatly organize its functioning.

Gold CIO: Joydeep Dutta, ICICI Securities Limited

With a view to deepen the company's relationships with customers, standardize SRM to manage the sales process, identify and retain revenue generating customers and improve productivity of sales force, ICICI Securities Limited went for an upgrade of its existing CRM solution — Sales Relationship Management System (SRM).

The upgrade included an integrated Financial Planner, integration of SRM with DNC registry, automation of lead servicing etc. The implementation provided the company with a 360 view of the customer, increased overall employee productivity by about 15 per cent and sales by more than 24 per cent and reduced its employee costs. The jury felt that the scale of the implementations including SRM and CRM was commendable.

Silver CIO: Meheriar Patel, Globus Stores Pvt Ltd

Globus Stores implemented product lifecycle management (PLM) system to track and converge production processes. Inter-departmental conflict was the main source of the ideation for this project. Prior to implementing PLM, every production merchandiser used to spend at least 30 per cent of his time and energy on generating reports.

Now all the required reports are available on the click of a button resulting in a 30 per cent increase in on-time delivery of merchandise. It also helped production department activities to streamline with proper process flow. Zero cost implementation of PLM with in house development helped the company to save Rs 60 lakh. The jury felt that PLM helped the company resolve inter-departmental conflicts to a great extent.

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Individual awards

Best Innovator: Girish Rao, Marico Ltd.

Marico Ltd innovatively used camera mobiles to collect real time information on kardi seeds market to increase contract farming acreage and productivity. Implementing a contract management system helped Marico to bring down dropouts (contracting to sowing) from 36 per cent (2008-09) to 28 per cent (2009-10). Timely information about crop inputs has helped increase yield thus putting Rs. 4 crore extra in the hands of the farmers.

To address the issue of availability of power in rural areas, the company deployed solar battery chargers so that the mobile batteries could be charged. The jury felt the overall strategy of the company with different strands was very innovative. They used technology to ensure that they generate real-time information, which in turn helped in improving their business.

Best Delivery Execution: Sudhir Bahuguna, RGTIL

Reliance Gas Transportation Infrastructure Limited (RGTIL) implemented Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system along a 1400 km pipeline to monitor and control the pipeline remotely from operation centers. The system provided excellent efficiency in pipeline operation and business functionalities in terms of data reliability achieved by real-time data mining.

Thanks to end-to-end automation, the entire business operations could be managed by four resources compared to 10-12 resources helping to improve fortnightly revenue collection worth Rs 850 crore. The jury felt the scale of the implementation was amazing. The company has managed to do a very complex program without compromising on deadline.

Best Green IT: Suresh A Shanmugam, Mahindra and Mahindra Financial Services limited

Mahindra and Mahindra implemented green solutions which were more energy efficient, drew less power and made a real difference in the world by helping to reduce overall CO2 emissions. The company also implemented thermal paper and scanners, which helped it reduce approximately 10 millions copies of papers used for documentary proofs. The jury felt the company has a great overall strategy and drive in using IT as an enabler in its programs.

Operational Excellence: Kishore Raveendranathan of Aditya Birla Minacs

Aditya Birla Minacs developed MaxView, a Business Intelligence (BI) application, to provide graphical dashboards, scorecards and analytic capabilities. Adoption of this application helped clients have a clearer visibility of the real-time snapshot and to compare the performance of previous weeks, months and years. It also helped focus on standardization and consistencies across numerous sites and business functions which enabled the company to reduce reporting setup for new clients by approximately 40 per cent.

With a defined governance model around the framework, this execution was compiled with a savings of 15 per cent resource utilization and 11 per cent cost. It also helped reduce manual reporting by 25 per cent, resulting in a reduction of manual reporting operating costs. The jury felt with MaxView, the company achieved a significant process improvement and the company reduced many complex processes with this BI application.